Riley Greene suffered a significant tear on Tuesday — but it wasn’t to any sort of ligament on his body.
It was to his pants as he slid into home plate.
In the ninth inning against the Pirates, the Tigers outfielder was coming home to score from second, and when Greene slid into home, his pants ripped at the seams, exposing the black compression wear underneath his uniform.
The wardrobe malfunction drew a hearty laugh from Greene’s teammates after got back into the dugout, as a video by Bally Sports’ Johnny Kane showed the Tigers hooting and hollering at the situation.
“Are you kidding me?” someone can be heard saying in the short clip shared on X.
The Tigers scored four runs in the ninth inning to rally back from a 3-1 deficit to take the game, 5-3, to move to 7-4 to start the 2024 season.
The incident is sure to light a fire under those who have criticized the Nike-designed, Fanatics-produced uniforms that were the talk of spring training for all the wrong reasons.
MLB officials tried to mitigate the complaints, and commissioner Rob Manfred said he anticipated the complaints to go away.
“In baseball, any new initiative, there’s going to be some negative feedback,” Manfred said in February, according to the Associated Press. “First and most important, these are Nike jerseys. So we entered this partnership with Nike because of who they are and the kinds of products that they use. Everything they’ve done for us so far has been absolutely, 100 percent successful across the board.
“The jerseys are different. They’re designed to be performance wear as opposed to what has traditionally been worn. So they are going to be different, but they have been tested more extensively than any jersey in any sport.”
